Re: [PLUG] Backup solution

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 12:42 PM Keith via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I think scope should be talked about too.  The op was talking about
> imaging their system with dd so we're not talking about file backup.
> Cloud services are going to be expensive for large datasets and the lack
> of bandwidth doesn't make them viable for regular use.

++ - cloud is not so reasonable for imaging.

> What about personal pictures and video?  Ok, so now we're probably pushing
> terabytes.  If something happens, most people want to be able to recover
> everything.

LOL, my duplicity daily backups currently use 780GB of space on AWS.
That includes two full backup sets (a full plus a month or two of
incrementals in each set).  My permanent backups of stuff that doesn't
change (which includes photos older than a month) is up to 1.9TB.

My AWS bill is a few dollars per month.  It really isn't that bad
considering that hard drives don't last forever and this has multiple
site redundancy (for the permanent stuff).

Now, recovering everything would definitely be an issue.  AWS does
charge substantial fees for this, but it still only adds up to
something like $200 or so.  At my scale it is actually cheaper to use
the Snowcone service and have them ship it to me physically, which is
probably faster anyway for 2TB.

> Disk is cheap... buy two (or three)... mirror and encrypt them. Keep one
> at the ready and get the other in a proper safe, in your everyday bag or
> give the other to someone you trust.  I think we've forgot the value of
> relying the local community for things like this.  Its an option that
> should not be overlooked.

That is definitely a consideration, but you do need to make sure
you're rotating and verifying your media so that you know it is always
good, probably with multiple redundancy.

My 2TB of data sounds like a lot, but I only generate maybe 100GB per
month when I'm actively taking lots of photos, so FIOS keeps up with
that fine, and there are no transfer fees into AWS.  Sure, it will
cost some money to retrieve the data, but I have redundancy and local
backups anyway, so this is for a doomsday scenario like the house
burning down.  If my house burns down forking out $200 to get my
photos back is really not a big deal - I wouldn't be surprised if I
could get insurance to cover it.  Plus it isn't like I need them back
in a day.

AWS Glacier has only gotten cheaper so you should definitely check it
out as an option.  Swapping around disks isn't a bad idea but doing it
online is a lot more automated.  The daily backups are just a cron
job, and once a month I manually archive a month of photos, which is
just a matter of running mv (to get it out of my daily backup set),
tar, gpg, and s3cmd to upload it.  Each of those takes hours but it
really isn't that big a deal.

If you go the Snowcone route you're paying $66 for an 8TB unit so at
that point it is just $30/TB to load as much as you want onto it.  It
also works both ways if you have a few TB of data to send to them (in
which case you just pay for the unit itself and not the data).  They
also have MUCH larger options if you have more data to deal with.

-- 
Rich
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